Maybe a better analogy is nitromethane. If you put it in your honda civic, you will blow up your engine. You put it in a top-fuel dragster which cranks out thousands of hp and needs an engine rebuild after each race.
Depending on who you ask, RP-1 costs between 20 and 80 times what diesel goes for. Others have tortured this analogy enough, but you certainly don't want to fuel your non-rocket startup with funding that costs far too much, which is conceptually adjacent to the point of the original article.
* I will be entering this reply into "most HN comment" contest running at the end of this year